Corrections Department Director resigns

The head of Iowa’s prison system is leaving. Iowa Department of Corrections director Gary Maynard resigned Friday. Maynard, who is 63 years old, has been named the secretary of Public Safety and Correctional Services for the state of Maryland.

Iowa’s new governor had just reappointed Maynard to head Iowa prisons. On Friday afternoon, Governor Culver appointed a man who’s worked in Iowa’s prison system since 1977 to the agency’s top job on an interim basis. John Baldwin has been deputy director of the Iowa Department of Corrections since 1983. The State of Iowa operates nine prisons and nearly nine-thousand inmates are currently behind the bars of a state prison.